Can Vietnam cope with change?

I had seen and shared the above picture via Facebook.

A while later, on a night out, a friend’s Vietnamese wife in her early thirties commented on it.

“That’s how it used to be,” she said. “I can remember it like that”.

I must admit, up to that point, I hadn’t really give any thought to the timescale of the picture.  Nor to those who had lived through such scenes.  I suppose I had presumed the people in these pictures would be old by now.

But, they’re not. They’re younger than me.

Yesterday a friend was talking about her memories of Tet – the lunar new year celebrations.

The whole family would travel 90 kilometres to their home village on a rickety bicycle.  By that stage her family was four-strong, so dad would pedal, mum would sit on the back and somewhere in between they’d find space for two kids and luggage. When they reached hills they would all get off and walk.

This annual bike trip happened from when they were just a couple of years old until they were so big they couldn’t  both be carried – at which point mum got a bike too.

One Tet journey she told of how they’d caught a ferry over the Red River and found all their luggage had been stolen.  Not even being able to pay the ferry fee, the kids had to hand over  their Tet “lucky money” gifts to cover the cost of tickets.

On arriving, the Tet meal would be chicken – a relatively rare and exotic food.

She told me of eating very little but rice and cabbage for one particularly bad year.  On a good day there’d be a spot or two or tomato to add a bit of colour. Sometimes it would even be cooked with oil.  But for the most part it was boiled rice and cabbage every day. Pork was a luxury.  Chicken, as I said, was for Tet.

The amazing aspect to this story is that these people were not the poorest. From what I can gather they could almost be considered middle class. She says of the cabbage and rice that they were lucky – some people had nothing to eat.

These days she drives a Vesper, runs a small business and can even afford to travel overseas. Earlier she was lucky enough to study in the UK.

Back home I could just about imagine hearing such a tale from a great-grandmother.  You’d surely be looking back almost a hundred years  to find examples of such sparse simple living.  But this represents only a quarter of a century.

Just how does a country cope with such a rapid change?

You could argue, of course, that Vietnam doesn’t.  It’s all too easy to point at the traffic chaos and say the infrastructure is overloaded.  You could, and probably should, be also horrified at the bed sharing in Vietnamese hospitals.

But, the reality is – they got here.  Collectively they reached this point.  The country coped and the people worked hard.

But what does that fast pace of change do to you?  Do you expect it to continue?  Do you remain thankful or do you start to get greedy? Is there enough of a collective memory of quiet Hanoi to not want to completely overload this city?

Or is the memory of poverty stronger? Does it prompt a desire not to return to those days, whatever the cost?

We do need to remind ourselves that this country is a success story.  This is what development looks like.  But there is still much to be done, both in terms of continuing to fight poverty and in building an infrastructure that can cope.

It’d be easy to say that no one wants a return to the days of rice and cabbage but that would be forgetting that, no doubt, there are still people eating just that or even less.

However, since I returned I’ve noticed a subtle change in attitude.  The emphasis used to be on escaping from poverty.  Now it’s on coping with what has replaced it.

As ever, it’s the current rate of change, even more than the history, which continues to make this country so fascinating.

Old Hanoi pics from here.